Announcing ncurses 5.9

The Ncurses (new curses) library is a free software emulation
of curses in System V Release 4.0, and more. It uses Terminfo
format, supports pads and color and multiple highlights and forms
characters and function-key mapping, and has all the other
SYSV-curses enhancements over BSD Curses.

The ncurses code was developed under GNU/Linux. It has been in
use for some time with OpenBSD as the system curses library, and
on FreeBSD and NetBSD as an external package. It should port
easily to any ANSI/POSIX-conforming UNIX. It has even been ported
to OS/2 Warp!

The distribution includes the library and support utilities,
including a terminfo compiler tic, a decompiler infocmp, clear,
tput, tset, and a termcap conversion tool captoinfo. Full manual
pages are provided for the library and tools.

Release Notes

This release is designed to be upward
compatible from ncurses 5.0 through 5.8; very few applications
will require recompilation, depending on the platform. These are
the highlights from the change-log since ncurses 5.8 release.

This is a bug-fix release, correcting a small number of urgent
problems in the ncurses library from the 5.8 release.

It also improves the Ada95 binding:

fixes a longstanding portability problem with its use of
the set_field_type
function. Because that function uses variable-length argument
lists, its interface with gnat does not work with certain
platforms.

improves configurability and portability, particularly when
built separately from the main ncurses tree. The 5.8 release
introduced scripts which can be used to construct separate
tarballs for the Ada95 and ncurses examples.

Those were a proof of concept. For the 5.9 release, those
scripts are augmented with rpm- and dpkg-scripts used in test
builds against a variety of gnat- and system ncurses versions
as old as gnat 3.15 and ncurses 5.4 (see snapshots and
systems tested here.

additional improvements were made for portability of the
ncurses examples, adding rpm- and dpkg-scripts for test-builds.
See this
page for snapshots and other information.

The utilities have options to allow you to filter terminfo
entries for use with less capable
Curses/Terminfo versions such
as the HP/UX and AIX ports.

The Ncurses package also has many useful extensions over
SVr4:

The API is 8-bit clean and base-level conformant with the
X/OPEN curses specification, XSI curses (that is, it implements
all BASE level features, and most EXTENDED features). It
includes many function calls not supported under SVr4 curses
(but portability of all calls is documented so you can use the
SVr4 subset only).

Unlike SVr3 curses, Ncurses can write to the
rightmost-bottommost corner of the screen if your terminal has
an insert-character capability.

Ada95 and C++ bindings.

Support for mouse event reporting with X Window xterm and
FreeBSD and OS/2 console windows.

Extended mouse support via Alessandro Rubini's gpm
package.

The function wresize allows you to resize
windows, preserving their data.

The function use_default_colors allows you to
use the terminal's default colors for the default color pair,
achieving the effect of transparent colors.

The functions keyok and
define_key allow you to better control the use of
function keys, e.g., disabling the Ncurses KEY_MOUSE, or by
defining more than one control sequence to map to a given key
code.

Support for 256-color terminals, such as modern xterm, when
configured using the --enable-ext-colors
option.

Support for 16-color terminals, such as aixterm
and modern xterm.

Better cursor-movement optimization. The package now
features a cursor-local-movement computation more efficient
than either BSD's or System V's.

Super hardware scrolling support. The screen-update code
incorporates a novel, simple, and cheap algorithm that enables
it to make optimal use of hardware scrolling, line-insertion,
and line-deletion for screen-line movements. This algorithm is
more powerful than the 4.4BSD Curses quickch
routine.

Real support for terminals with the magic-cookie glitch.
The screen-update code will refrain from drawing a highlight if
the magic- cookie unattributed spaces required just before the
beginning and after the end would step on a non-space
character. It will automatically shift highlight boundaries
when doing so would make it possible to draw the highlight
without changing the visual appearance of the screen.

It is possible to generate the library with a list of
pre-loaded fallback entries linked to it so that it can serve
those terminal types even when no terminfo tree or termcap file
is accessible (this may be useful for support of
screen-oriented programs that must run in single-user
mode).

The tic/captoinfo utility provided with Ncurses has the
ability to translate many termcaps from the XENIX, IBM and
AT&T extension sets.

A BSD-like tset utility is provided.

The Ncurses library and utilities will automatically read
terminfo entries from $HOME/.terminfo if it exists, and compile
to that directory if it exists and the user has no write access
to the system directory. This feature makes it easier for users
to have personal terminfo entries without giving up access to
the system terminfo directory.

You may specify a path of directories to search for
compiled descriptions with the environment variable
TERMINFO_DIRS (this generalizes the feature provided by
TERMINFO under stock System V.)

In terminfo source files, use capabilities may refer not
just to other entries in the same source file (as in System V)
but also to compiled entries in either the system terminfo
directory or the user's $HOME/.terminfo directory.

A script (capconvert) is provided to help
BSD users transition from termcap to terminfo. It gathers the
information in a TERMCAP environment variable and/or a
~/.termcap local entries file and converts it to an equivalent
local terminfo tree under $HOME/.terminfo.

Automatic fallback to the /etc/termcap file can be compiled
in when it is not possible to build a terminfo tree. This
feature is neither fast nor cheap, you don't want to use it
unless you have to, but it's there.

The table-of-entries utility toe makes it
easy for users to see exactly what terminal types are available
on the system.

The library meets the XSI requirement that every macro
entry point have a corresponding function which may be linked
(and will be prototype-checked) if the macro definition is
disabled with #undef.

An HTML "Introduction to Programming with NCURSES" document
provides a narrative introduction to the curses programming
interface.

State of the Package

Numerous bugs present in earlier
versions have been fixed; the library is far more reliable than
it used to be. Bounds checking in many `dangerous' entry points
has been improved. The code is now type-safe according to gcc
-Wall. The library has been checked for malloc leaks and arena
corruption by the Purify memory-allocation tester.

The Ncurses code has been tested with a wide variety of
applications including (versions starting with those noted):

The Ncurses distribution includes a selection of test programs
(including a few games).

Who's Who and What's What

Zeyd Ben-Halim started it from
a previous package pcurses, written by Pavel Curtis. Eric S.
Raymond continued development. Jürgen Pfeifer wrote most of
the form and menu libraries. Ongoing work is being done by
Thomas Dickey.
Thomas Dickey acts as the maintainer for the Free Software
Foundation, which holds the copyright on ncurses. Contact the
current maintainers at bug-ncurses@gnu.org.

Future Plans

We need people to help with these projects. If you are
interested in working on them, please join the Ncurses list.

Other Related Resources

The distribution provides a newer
version of the terminfo-format terminal description file once
maintained by Eric
Raymond . Unlike the older version, the termcap and
terminfo data are provided in the same file, and provides several
user-definable extensions beyond the X/Open specification.